2017年1月8日日曜日

New Year Message from the Editor in Chief of Progress in Earth and Planetary Science

[Japanese text follows English. 日本語版は英語版の後に表示します。]

A happy new year
to all．

In 2016 PEPS received 60 manuscripts and
published 37 papers. Since PEPS was only launched two and a half years ago we
have not yet had time to finish our registrations with either of the main
international research paper databases Scopus or Web of Science. In view of
this I think we can regard the number of published papers as a modest sign of
success. We have now completed our applications to both Scopus and Web of
Science and these are currently being reviewed. I hope that I will be able to
report sometime later this year that both applications have been accepted.

At the moment it takes on average 190 days
from receiving a manuscript until it is published. The editorial team is
focusing on “rapid review and publication” in order to reduce this time. The
editorial office monitors the speed with which manuscripts proceed through the
system and sends email notification to the relevant editors when there is any
delay．However the time to publication is largely
dependent on the speed at which referees are able to review papers. I would
therefore like to take this opportunity firstly to thank everyone who has or
will review papers for PEPS for their hard work, and secondly to humbly ask
that referees aim to complete their reviews as quickly as is reasonably
possible.

We receive many manuscripts written by
authors who are not native English speakers: for these manuscripts we have
adopted a system of provisional acceptance. Under this system, manuscripts are sent
out to referees and those by non native authors that are favorably reviewed are
provisionally accepted and then sent to an English language proofreading
company at the JpGU’s expense in order to correct any minor mistakes in
expression or grammar. Although this all happens before the manuscript is
formally accepted, in practice provisional and formal acceptance are nearly
equivalent and we have so far published all of our provisionally accepted
articles. The reaction to this process has generally been positive but we have
had some complaints that manuscripts have been over edited, that the burden on
authors is increased and that the system leads to delays in publication. There is some truth in these complaints.
However it is our main goal that PEPS be regarded as a journal of the first
rank: we are working hard to achieve this, and, I feel, have had much success
in doing so. In order to maintain our status we have to consistently publish high
quality papers where excellent scientific content is clearly presented and precisely
explained. Unfortunately this requires, amongst other things, a certain level
of English language competence. I apologize for the additional burden that this
places on our non native authors, and hope that they will understand our
position.

I have been aware for a while that Japanese institutions
have been suffering from the rapid increase in online journal subscription
fees. In the past few months there have been several international developments
affecting this issue. At the end of last year negotiations between Elsevier and
a group of German state funded universities and research institutions broke
down with the result that from January 2017 researchers at these organizations
will lose online access to many Elsevier journals. Similar problems have occurred
in Taiwan and Peru (Nature News on 23 December 2016). Such problems serve to emphasize the
important role that open access journals have to play in the field of academic
publishing, and these developments further convince me that PEPS, as a high quality international open
access journal covering all of the areas of Earth and planetary science, has an
important role to play.

Recent years have seen the increasing
popularity of letter journals, and indeed these offer a number of advantages:
the compact presentation enables readers to quickly acquire an overview of
material they are interested in whilst authors benefit from the relatively
short time between submitting a paper and its publication. Despite these
benefits, the importance of detailed exposition of new scientific ideas and
results of course remains undiminished and this is why PEPS has chosen to focus
on this area. We want our authors to explain their ideas in detail and we allow
them up to 50,000 words per paper in order to do so (and, as I mentioned above,
we are working to further reduce the time to publication of our papers).

The purpose of academic study is not only the
creation of new knowledge. For it to be of any use such knowledge must be
transmitted to the wider community, and we at PEPS are doing all we can to help
with this. I would like to thank everyone for the assistance they have already
given us and respectfully ask you all to continue to help, firstly by
considering publishing new work in PEPS, and secondly by refereeing any articles we
send you as quickly as is reasonably possible．

Finally let me wish you all a happy,
productive and prosperous 2017．

Yasufumi Iryu

PEPS Editor in Chief

PEPS総編集長の井龍 康文です．2017年の年頭にあたり，皆様に御挨拶申し上げます．

2016年，PEPSは37編の論文を出版しました．また，投稿を受け付けた原稿の数は60編でした．これは，PEPS創刊から2年8ヶ月ほどであること，Web of Science（WOS）やSCOPUSという国際的な論文データベースに採録されていない現時点では，健闘している数値であると認識しています．なお，WOSおよびSCOPUSへの採録ですが，昨年，採録申請を行い，現在，審査を受けております．2017年に皆様に朗報をお届けできると期待しています．